Telecity's Docklands hosting and back-up centre, Meridian Gate, is suffering a power outage.
We've had emails from several customers currently twiddling their thumbs waiting for services to be restored. No official word from the company yet, but we'll update this story should they return our phone calls.
Reg readers told us …

Re: worrying trend

Well, the Reg could do the traditional journalist thing of going and investigating this story and writing it up, but I suspect that may take a week or two at which point it will be a case of comparing the offical version of event's with the Reg's.

I'm more interested to find out what's happening today while support are saying that it will be fixed "real soon now" and (highly speculative example) some geezers heading down the M20 with a truck load of IT equipment headed for Asia/Africa.

1st power failure at Meridian Gate for at least 3 years

I co-lo at Meridian Gate, and this is the first power outage I've had there. My supplier (i.e. reseller of space there) say Telecity won't have a report on the outage until tomorrow morning. I hope this is human error rather than equipment failure, as a new monkey can be hired less disruptively than replacing the power infrastructure to the building. The outage was quite short. My UPS (yes, some of my equipment has a UPS as you can never trust a DC completely!) says the outage was about 20 minutes, and apparently the generators were not used today.

this from telecity - although they are now NOT going to switch to generators

Following the power incident at Meridian Gate earlier today, we have identified a fault on a breaker in the power distribution system.

To ensure reliability of power supply to customer equipment and in order to carry out further investigation, TelecityGroup will need to isolate mains power to the site. The site load will be transferred to generator supply today at 17:30 (BST). The transfer to generator supply will be carried out in a controlled manner and TelecityGroup’s specialist contractors and engineers will monitor the power systems throughout the investigation.

The backup generators are set up in an N+1 configuration. We do not anticipate any impact to your service whilst these investigative works are carried out.

We will issue a further update once these works have been completed and site load has been transferred back to normal mains power supply.

Get what you pay for

It's a tier 3 datacentre so there are some common power components. Typically a single bank of UPS's will carry the building load in an N+1 configuration. A failure of the output side of the UPS banks, as seen at Blue Square recently iirc, will take out everything with no option to run on generator power.

erm no it isnt..

Tier 1: Guaranteeing 99.671% availability.

Tier 2: Guaranteeing 99.741% availability.

Tier 3: Guaranteeing 99.982% availability.

Tier 4: Guaranteeing 99.995% availability.

Tier 2 Definition:

Tier 2 data centres are less susceptible to disruption, as they have N+1 across their cooling and power units. As they feature UPS and generators they are more protected from outages, although these features will still travel across a single path. Tier 2 data centres also benefit from having raised flooring, therefore being more protected from flooding.

One Co-lo provider lists the following as tier 2..

■Telecity Meridian Gate

■Telecity Harbour Exchange 2

■Telecity Harbour Exchange 6 & 7

■Telecity Harbour Exchange 8 & 9

As for Tier 4 I thought the uptime institute specified it must have armed security gaurds?